Frequent Miler on the Air - Citi's awesome rewards program | Ep219 | 9-9-23

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

Citi's ThankYou program gets lets attention than other major bank rewards point programs, but it has some unique strengths that deserve your attention. This week, Greg and Nick determine whether and for whom Citi can be an awesome option. 00:00 Intro 00:47 Giant Mailbag 03:38 Mattress Running the Numbers 03:40 Marriott Homes & Villas promo 04:45 Wyndham points on sale for less than 1cpp 08:27 Buy Finnair Plus points  12:44 Award Talk 12:46 Now transfer Virgin points to a friend with low flat fee 15:04 Air France to deepen partnership with Etihad 17:45 Rooms.aero launches 21:22 Main Event: Citi's awesome rewards program 22:56 High-level view of positives and negatives 24:14 Citi's ThankYou credit cards' https://frequentmiler.com/typremier/ https://frequentmiler.com/dc/ https://frequentmiler.com/TYRewardsPlus/ https://frequentmiler.com/customcash/ 31:55 Citi's unique-ish transfer partners 38:30 Other useful Citi partners 51:34 Question of the Week: Downgrade strategy from Sapphire Preferred to Freedom Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did Citi do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Citi's awesome rewards program. Did you mean Citi's pretty good rewards program, Craig?

We tend to give Citi short shrift. I'm not sure I'm using the word right. I think you meant it's okay. It's a lukewarm program. I'm going to try to convince you it's awesome. What? Their thank you program is awesome. So we will talk about that in today's main event.

And first, of course, we have the giant mailbag, but I do want to mention something. Someone wrote into us saying, I guess this is a giant mailbag segment now that I think about it, because this is... All right. Somebody wrote in, right? So someone wrote in saying, you guys really ought to introduce yourselves. And I think that's a good idea. I'm Greg Davis Keene. I'm the founder of Frequent Miler. And I'm here as always with Nicholas Reyes, the legend, the fedora man. What can I say? He's the guy who came up with the getting to Hawaii for hardly any points on Turkish. He wrote the posts on cruising for free over and over and over. Look at this, Michael.

What an intro I'm getting here. What an intro. It's building me up here. You know, there are probably 20 other great things I could say about Nicholas Reyes. 60 things he could say that would be less flattering. But let's move on. So there we go. Let's move on. let's move on. Yeah. So there we go. Let's move on.

Let's move on. All right. Good. Now to really dive into the giant mailbag. This giant mail comes from Russell who says, I thought I'd share an unexpected but kind of obvious fine hotels and resorts advantage. And as an aside, fine hotels and resorts is that hotel program that if you have an Amex Platinum card, you can book into the fine hotels and resorts program.

And he said, I'm currently in Rome. Now he said this a while ago. So this was sometime early in the summer, I think. I'm currently in Rome with family and our hotel turned out to be a poor choice. So I wanted to find something else to switch to. Rack rates for last minute in Rome are $1,200 to $2,000 per night for what would be $200 to $300 places. Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts is normally expensive, but its rates are contracted rates. This means I could book Fine Hotels and resorts room for around six hundred dollars at the saint regis expensive but half the rack rate wow so that's interesting that's good to know i never even would have thought of that but uh but cool so if you're ever in that situation where you're at a last minute booking then maybe you can save some money by booking through fine

hotels and resorts who would have ever thought you could save money by booking through FHR? Right, right. I mean, it comes with great perks, but you don't normally think of it actually giving you a lower overall price for the hotel room. I wonder, you know, it might work for other things like game day in a city that's dominated by, you know, a big team, New Year's Eve, things like that. Maybe it's worth checking those as well so that's pretty cool interesting all right thanks russell yeah all right great so we're not going to do a crazy thing this week there's uh we got other things to talk about like many of our mattress running the numbers things i say many because we've got multiple mattress running

the numbers numbersy things to run the numbers on So we've got a triple header today for mattress running the numbers. First up, we got Marriott Homes and Villas, which is once again offering a bonus when you book through them. You can get 20,000 Marriott Bonvoy points when you book a three-night stay. Sounds like a great deal, Greg. Should I be booking my mattress run right now? There's got to be some cheap three-night stays somewhere where I can pick up 20,000 points. Oh, I am sure there are three nights, cheap three night stays somewhere, but it won't help because this offer requires spending at least fourteen hundred dollars on your stay. So it's, you know, so let's move on. It's it's it's a it's a fine rebate if you're going to book

the hotel anyway. But don't go out you're going to book the hotel anyway, but don't go out of your way to book one just for the promo. And shop around because as Greg has shown before, sometimes Marriott's got great prices, but often those same properties are cross-listed on Airbnb and Vicasa and VRBO, and they may be much cheaper on those other platforms sometimes. So it's worth taking a look. Yeah. Good safety tip. All right. Next one up. You can now, uh, once again, buy Wyndham points for less than a penny each because they're having them on sale. Uh, this time, uh, it's a 30% off their usual price and it, it makes the

price per point only 0.91 cents per point. So about nine tenths of a penny for each for each point. And you could get up to 100,000 of them. What do you think? Should I do it? I actually think I'm going to buy some of these today. Crazy as that sounds, because I recently used a whole bunch of mine on Vicasa booking. So I were low on points and I am like in the midst of planning a stop in the UK next year. And lots of people have asked us, what about the cottages.com partnership? Because, you know, we've written a lot about the Casa, but Wyndham also has this cottages.com partnership that generally excites me a lot less. I don't usually travel to the UK, but it just so happens that we're going to try to put in a couple of days.

And there are some Hyatt's I'd almost rather stay at. But I was like, oh, well, you know, if I could do this cottages.com thing, I can answer people who have asked, oh, how does it work? How's the booking process? Because we both booked through cottages.com years ago under a crazy promo they ran. But I'm willing to bet things have changed at least a little bit in terms of hopefully in terms of the ease of booking and all that. So so I think I'm going to buy some of these points today so that I can try to book one of these, which is kind of crazy because I have a welcome bonus coming in probably in a couple of weeks, but I don't really want to wait. I just want to get the property that I need booked. So I'm probably going to buy some of these points.

In general, I'm not a big speculative point buyer, but in a situation like that, I'm probably going to buy some of these points. In general, I'm not a big speculative point buyer. But in a situation like that, I'm looking at a spot where the property for two nights would cost about $800. And instead, I can buy the points for like $270. So because of course, I have the Wyndham when I have one of the Wyndham earner cards, so I should get a 10% discount. I believe I don't know for sure whether that applies to cottages.com bookings, but we'll find out. Yeah. Overall, I think when window points are available for less than a penny each and you have something coming up where you think you're likely to use them, it's a great option. I prefer that a lot over transferring transferable points to Wyndham,

both Citi and Capital One transfer one-to-one to Wyndham. If you think about it, it's like you could have cashed out Citi points, for example, for one cent each. You're getting less than one cent per point value by transferring to Wyndham versus cashing out your points for pennies and buying the Wyndham points. You'd get actually more Wyndham points that way. One little aside, Citi currently does have a small transfer bonus to Wyndham. So that changes the math a little bit right now, but still for Wyndham, I'd prefer to buy the points when I need them. If I can't generate enough points with the Wyndham earner business card. One little safety tip about cottages.com. So, so the cost of vacation rentals costs 15,000 points per bedroom per night.

And that's what cottages.com originally costs when they, when they partnered with Wyndham. But now, or at least several years ago, it changed to, it's often 15,000 points per bedroom, but it's sometimes 30,000 points per bedroom. And I don't know how you could find out other than calling to ask. Well, then we will find out. So I look forward to reporting back

on how that works out. Because like I said, a number of people have asked and I haven't had the reason to look into it, but now I do. So we'll give it a shot and see how it goes. All right. So that was Wyndham. And then next up, we've got another opportunity to buy points. So we just talked about buying Wyndham points, but also now you can buy Finnair Plus points right

now. Don't you want to load up on Finnair Plus points at 0.69 cents per point, Greg? You're ready to like load up and have a ton of Finnair plus points. Cause we know there's lots of sweet spots for Finnair plus points, right? I think we know that we're not aware of any sweet spots for Finnair plus points, unless you are, I don't know. No, no, I'm not aware. I bought, I bought these this morning. Um, so, so here's the deal. Finnair is joining the Avios collection of airlines in spring of 2024, so next year. And what that means is they're going to change their award currency from Finnair Plus points to Avios, and you'll be able to move your Avios points from Finnair to British Airways to Qatar to Iberia, et cetera. And so use them in wherever the best sweet spot is.

So that's really cool. But they're not transferring one-to-one. They're transferring three to two. So basically, this is a long-term way of buying Avios for 1.04 cents per point with this deal. And I think that's really good. This solved... The reason I bought the points is it solved a problem I've had for a while as a business owner? As a small business owner, I'm often traveling for work reasons, but often using points is the best way to book my flights. And I don't have any way to expense when I use my points to book flights. So what I'm doing is basically expensing the purchasing of points and earmarking all those points for business travel is how I'm doing it. So this way,

I get to make it a legitimate business expense. Yep. That's smart. And it makes a lot of sense because like you said, there are a lot of situations where Avios are going to be your best bet by far. And so you wouldn't want to, you know, if your option is to spend $500 on a flight or 10,000 obvious, you wouldn't want to pay the 500. And even if you get expensive, you don't want to pay the 500 if you get five points for 100 bucks. So, yeah, that's I think that's a really interesting play. And, you know, at these kind of rates, when we're talking about the one cent, very similar to Wyndham, you know, I have Citi and Capital One points that I could transfer to Wyndham, but I don't want to use those points at just one cent per point. You know, for a currency I can buy for one cent per point. Similar thing here.

Do you want to transfer to British Airways or Iberia or whatever if you could just buy those for a penny each and save your points for more valuable use. I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of argument to be said there. Some people say, oh, well, you should hang on to the money because it can grow and blah, blah, blah. You could figure that all out for yourself, I suppose. But I can certainly see the appeal of buying them at this cheap price for now and then keeping your points flexible for other things down the road if you've got the cash on hand to be able to put into some of these. Another way to think about this is if you are earning cash back through bank bonuses or through, for example, we've talked many times about how Bank of America makes it possible to earn 2.62% cash back everywhere through a variety of tricks, then you could think about using those cash back rewards and turning them, sort of transferring those pennies into points that can

be worth more than pennies because of sweet spots. So there's many British Airways and Iberia sweet spots, and there's certain and there's certain windom sweet spots and so these are both examples of where you can turn your pennies into into into points that that can be worth much more than a penny each so yeah yeah very good excellent great play there okay so that's mattress running the numbers next up let's talk about award talk. So award talk this week. First up, we've got Virgin. Virgin is now allowing members to transfer points from one member to another for a flat fee of $15. Now, in the past, as with most airlines, if you wanted to transfer your miles or points from one member to another, usually you'd pay some sort of flat fee plus often a charge per thousand

points that you transfer, making it totally unattractive to transfer from one member to another. But now if I want to send my Virgin Atlantic points to Greg, it'll cost me a flat fee of $15 to send, I guess, as many as I want to Greg, right? As far as I know. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's really nice. I mean, I'd prefer it was free, but it's still, uh, I think that's a really nice change to the program. And, uh, you know, if you have a friend network or family network, you know, where some of you have points in certain programs and, and someone needs to book something, uh, this makes it possible to, you know, move all the points together to book that whatever that something is.

So yeah, that's great. I wish more programs would do that, make it easier to move points around. Yeah, and I think this is particularly useful for people like Capital One card holders where I can't transfer my Capital One rewards directly to my wife's loyalty account, for instance. So if she's got a Capital One card, I can transfer my Capital One rewards to her Capital One rewards. But if she didn't have a Capital One card that earned miles, this would be a way if I wanted to get some Virgin Atlantic points in her account, I could transfer my Capital One to Virgin Atlantic and then transfer my Virgin Atlantic miles

from my account to her account. So again, like Greg said, it just makes it possible to be able to do stuff like that, which is useful for people in those programs where it's not as easy. Also, one other use case is like people often have sort of orphan miles that, you know, I've earned, I don't know, 18,000 miles and I don't know what to do with them. And so, you know, maybe you could offer that person, oh, well, I'll give you the 15 bucks if you send them to me. Yeah. So yeah, good stuff. All right. So next up, Air France and KLM are enhancing their partnership with Etihad. So right now they have sort of a light partnership, but they've announced that in a understanding

that they're going to be having reciprocal elite benefits, reciprocal frequent flyer benefits, I should say say so that you'll actually be able to earn like air france miles when flying when flying edihad and vice versa you better use either of these miles to fly the other uh the other program so um we'll see whether you know this turns out to be a good thing uh or not I don't think it's going to mean unlocking like Etihad First Apartments bookable from Air France because Air France doesn't let you book first class on their own flights, let alone on partner flights. But for booking like economy or business class, it might turn out to be a good deal. Yeah, it might be. And, you know, I think Air France is one that we've talked about some in the last few months, especially

ever since the Bilt had that crazy transfer bonus. But I think it doesn't often get much attention because they don't have like a set award chart. So you never know exactly how much something's going to cost. And so it doesn't get a ton of attention. But man, I found a lot of situations recently where they've had decent deals on awards, especially to Europe. Just actually last night, I booked an award. I booked Virgin Atlantic upper class to London because it was 73,000 miles and $200 only in their fees and surcharges. So that's much less. If I booked it directly through Virgin Atlantic, it would have been $975 worth of taxes and fees. So much less through Air France.

Now, 73,000 miles one way to Europe is not a screaming deal, but there's a 25% transfer bonus going as we record this from Amex. So that drops it down to effectively like 59,000 points per passenger. So, and I had a bunch of existing Air France miles that I had also gotten from a 25% transfer bonus. So, I just booked one last night, and that's a partner award that, again,

it's not the best deal running by any stretch, but not an awful deal either. And so, I'm hopeful that maybe we'll see some similar things with Etihad as this progresses. So let's keep our eye on it and cross our fingers that at the very least, Etihad's business class looks pretty reasonable on a lot of their flights. So if you can get it for a reasonable number of miles with Air France, that may be attractive. Yeah, it definitely could be. All right. Next up, rooms.ero. Have you taken a look at this one yet?

You know what? I actually haven't used it yet. And that's kind of crazy because Tim had so much enthusiasm for it and I just haven't taken a look at it yet. But I'm hoping you have. I've looked at it briefly. So this is from the same people who give us seats that era, which we've talked about before is one of my favorite new,

uh, flight award search finders. Uh, and, and, uh, so now they have, uh,

rooms that era, which is designed to help you find award stays. Um, so right now it's, it's in beta. Um, and right now it supports Hyatt, Hilton, and IHG. They're working, it seems aggressively to add more and more properties to the list of what is searchable. And you can do things like set up alerts to alert you when a particular hotel for whatever dates, you know, becomes available for what you need.

So that's really cool. I mean, I've talked in the past about a couple other tools that do similar things. There's MaxMyPoint and StayWithPoints. This one, I think right now is free, unlike the others, which you have to pay to get like the advanced alerts. So it's I think it's worth a look. And I think it has it has slightly different features than those other two. So it may do what you're looking for better. But basically, one of the reasons it's so important to have one of these tools is that Hyatt, for example, does not have an award calendar. If you want to find award

availability on Hyatt, you have to just plug in the dates you want and hope that something shows up. This tool lets you search for any dates that base rooms are available or search for any dates that suites are available things like that and so you can find what you need more easily yeah you know that's good news and I'll mention that I looked at it as you were talking about it here and specifically I looked at it because property that I have written about a couple times now, the Grand Hotel Victoria in Lake Como, and I stayed there this summer. And it's come up a few times that award availability is really hard to find there. Just a couple days ago, somebody posted in Frequent Mailer Insider saying that she keeps looking and

can't find any availability. And so I just popped this into Seeds.Aero as we were here, as Greg was talking, and I found, oh, I don't know, how many do they put in each? Probably 10 entries. So 15-ish different dates where there's availability for a standard room. And I haven't looked through to see which of those line up for consecutive days or not. But at any rate, it found 15 days when there are available rooms. So if you're looking for a place like that, where it's really hard to find that specific property, by the way, those available rooms were only in September and October of this year. I understand they're going through a remodel over the winter. So I don't know for sure when they're going to reopen yet. So that's why I

assume why there's been no availability for next year yet. At any rate, it's a tool that can help you find a room at a tool that can help you find a room at a place like that where you're having trouble finding availability and where maybe you're willing to plan your dates around finding an available room so yeah exciting very cool absolutely all right are we ready are we ready for the main event the main event welcome to the main event city's lukewarm that he's okay what was it city's awesome rewards program thank you rewards yeah i'm gonna try to convince nick that city's rewards program is awesome um We often mention Citi thank you points more as an afterthought because usually Amex and Chase are on top of mind as like the main transferable points currencies. And then we think about Capital One or sometimes Built is top of mind because they're having some like incredible transfer bonus or something like that.

But Citi's been often kind of left behind in things. And I think it's a legitimate contender as one of the best, one of the better, if not the best, transferable points programs. Wow, bold statement. You know, Greg's got an uphill battle to fight here because long term readers, followers, listeners will remember our 40K to far away challenge in 2019.

I already tried to prove that city points were better than everything else. And if you remember, Greg, I lost. So so I'm looking forward to trying to fight this fight that I've already lost before. Let's give it a shot. Let's give it a go. Let's see what we can do. But first, a balanced high-level view of the positives and negatives of the program. Positives. It has a few unique and useful transfer partners.

It offers great earning power from spend, and we'll get into details about why I say that. And you can get all that with $95 total annual fee across all the cards you get in this program. Negatives, you're not going to get many points through welcome bonuses. There's not much going on there there are with the credit cards don't offer any elite perks or travel protections and city thank you does is missing a couple of key transfer partners that we'll talk about a little bit later you know what's going to be really funny greg what's going to be really funny is when these long rumored like elite city cards with all these perks and things that you just said

they don't have like all of a sudden get released like three days after we publish this right that i don't have any inside info guys i don't know they're coming in three days but it'll be it'd be crazy if that happens and this does not age well but as of right now anyway at the time of recording that's all exactly why i'm saying greg has an uphill battle to climb here because there's not much going on all right let's talk about the credit cards though that are part of the thank you rewards program um the first city premiere it makes uh you need this card because it makes your thank you points transferable to partners and um

well i should say transferable partners at good rates the the fee-free cards allow some transfers uh but at poor poor transfer rates um it only costs 95 a year and it gives you 3x for grocery 3x for dining 3x at gas stations flights hotels and travel agencies so a lot of very useful 3x for dining, 3x at gas stations, flights, hotels, and travel agencies. So a lot of very useful 3x categories. That's good. Yeah, it's very good, right? Whether you're just using it for regular spend or if you're manufacturing spend, which you could probably do at grocery stores and gas stations, there's a lot going on there. So that's really nice.

And the 3x is not capped in any way. So that's sort of the backbone. You need that card, the premier. Then the next key card you need is the city double cash card. And the reason you need that, it just flat out gives you two X points everywhere. So when you're not earning three X with the premiere card you want to turn to the double cash card and earn 2x points and that's excellent too yes uh everyone except chase also has a 2x everywhere option but um this is this is good and it's uncapped unlike capped, unlike Amex's version of that. Citi Rewards Plus is the third card, which, you know, so you definitely need the Premier and the Double Cash, I think, to make a compelling combo.

Rewards Plus, you can get. It's also no annual fee. And you can get it and never actually put in your wallet and it'll still have the power that you need because once you combine your thank you accounts with the premier and the double cash and and the new rewards plus when you get it um whenever you redeem points they'll give you a 10 rebate on the points you redeemed up to a total of 10,000 points per year. So that means you could redeem up to 100,000 points a year, and you could redeem them either by transferring to airline or hotel programs, or you could cash out for a penny a point. Whatever you do to redeem

them, other than moving them to another person's Citi account, you'll get 10% of those points back. So that's a real nice sort of superpower for that rewards plus card. Otherwise, I never take it out of a binder where I keep cards that I have because they have powers, but I don't actually need to use it for spend. Finally, the Citi Custom Cash Card is one that earns, it also has no annual fee and earns five points per dollar on purchases in your top spend category each billing cycle up to $500 spent. So the eligible categories are restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, select travel, select transit, streaming services, drug stores, home improvement stores, fitness clubs, and live entertainment. And the key with this card is if you have one or two or three, just mark each card as like, I use this only for, let's say, grocery or only for dining. And that way, it becomes basically a 5X everywhere card, 5X card

for that type of spend. And as long as you pull the points with your other thank you cards, then you'll be able to use them together and transfer them to partners. And when you say market, put a little label on it. Somebody just the other day mentioned a label they saw on one of my wife's cards, and she explained why it was there. And they were like, oh, that's a great idea. I can't remember where that came up, but it came up a few days ago. So, yeah, just take a little piece of tape or something and put a label on it so you don't forget it and you don't mix them up because you don't want to be earning 1x on any of your purchases. And that's the other challenge with the city custom cash. You do have to keep track and make sure you're not spending far more than $500.

So either you need to not earmark that for a category where you're likely to spend far more than $500 or you need to track pretty closely how much you're spending in that category. Right, right. I think one reasonable approach is to, if there's a grocery store, let's say that you shop at frequently, take your card to that grocery store once a month, buy a $500 gift card to that store and then use that gift card from then on. That way, when that gift card runs out

before you've bought the next one, switch to your Citi Premier card to get 3DX for the rest of your spend there. That's a fantastic approach, yeah. Just to keep it really simple and not have to worry about it. Yep. You can also get multiple custom cash cards, not directly. What you have to do is sign up for other Citi cards, other personal Citi cards, not business cards.

And after a year, you can product change and you can product change the custom cash. And so I have three custom cash cards right now. And so that's a way to increase your 5X rewards capability. And in fact, I kind of recommend that other than signing up for the city premier card, these other cards don't tend to have good welcome offers. So, you know, a good way of getting things like the double cash or the rewards plus card is sign up for, let's say, American Airlines card. There's the American Airlines platinum card and the executive card. When they have good signup bonuses, sign up for those, get a big chunk of American Airlines miles, and then later product change to the double cash or the rewards plus or the custom cash.

So there's my first problem with this whole program. You got to really be playing the long game with SETI because you don't want to sign up for a custom cash or a double cash because double cash frequently has no welcome offer at all. So you definitely don't want to apply for that outright. It's just such a waste of an opportunity. And the custom cash when it has a welcome offer, it's pretty small, like maybe 20,000 points or something. So again, not particularly appealing. So you got to really be playing the long game here. And instead of accepting one of those terrible offers, you want to instead start with an American Airlines offer of 60,000 or 70,000 or 100,000 miles, however many miles they're offering on one of those. So you can get a much more valuable welcome offer on that American Airlines card. And then a year from now, because you can't do it before a year, you can't change from a card with an annual fee to a card with no annual fee within less than a year with most issuers. So yeah,

a year from now, you can finally get the card that you actually wanted and downgrade. Obviously, it's better than signing up outright for the custom cash or the double cash, but it means you're going to go in an entire year before you can actually implement the spending strategy you're all excited about because it's so awesome, right? You got to wait a year to implement that. Now that you say it all that way, like maybe the better approach, if you're eager to get started is to get your extra custom cash cards that way and just sign up directly to get what you need more quickly. You usually, every now and then they offer a 30k bonus instead of the standard 20k on the Rewards Plus or the Custom Cash.

So you can look for those. It's better than nothing. Right. Okay. So the Citi thank you points have a few unique-ish transfer partners. And I'm saying ish because I'm going to mention a couple that are available on like, let's say one other program, but are not common across all programs. But first of all, choice. The fact that you could transfer your points to choice privileges one to two means you get twice as many choice points as city thank you points that you started with. And there are many great uses for choice points. There's great sweet spots in Europe and even in the US in different ways. And

I don't want to dive into all the details, but even if you're not into sort of those low end hotels, there are opportunities to get some really nice hotels with choice points. And sometimes you just are in that situation where you do need one of those. In fact, my sister-in-law is running a marathon and every hotel, every hotel within like 30 miles was totally sold out except for the one quality. And that still had two rooms at 16,000 points per night. And we're talking even like 40 miles away. I was looking at paying almost $300 a night for rooms for this race.

And so I was like, oh my goodness, that's horrible to stay like a Hampton Inn. I was not particularly excited about that. So now instead we're right at the Quality Inn that's exactly in the middle of the town that the marathon's in and for 16,000 points per night. So it's useful to have something like this

for those niche scenarios where you're like, man, nothing's working right. And choice comes to the rescue. Right. And I'll mention one thing at the high end. Choice has a partnership with Preferred Hotels, and they charge anywhere from 25K to 55K points per night. But if you think of it, even at the 55K rate, that's fewer than 30,000 city points because of the one to two transfer. So that's a pretty darn good deal for a luxury hotel. Next up, they transfer one to one to Turkish.

And, you know, Turkish can be Turkish has a great, great award chart for booking Star Alliance flights. So you could book either Turkish's own flights at good rates, or you could book, for example, United flights when United awards are available and do crazy things like fly to Hawaii for, what is it again? 7,500 points one way. 7,500 points one way. That's just crazy cheap. Or 15,000 points one way. That's just crazy cheap, our 15,000 points round trip. So Capital One also has Turkish, but Chase and Amex, which are the programs we normally hold up as our favorites, do not have Turkish as an option. Built also has Turkish, FYI.

Built also does. That's right. I forgot about that. Another one that is one that is unique to Citi is, well, it's unique in being able to transfer one-to-one to EVA Air. EVA Air. I'm not sure how it's pronounced. But the cool thing about that is Eva Air provides a lot more award availability to its own members than to partners. And so recently, business class award flights to Asia have been nearly impossible to get. But checking Eva Air itself, there's like tons of availability to book business class. Now, it's not necessarily easy to do that because they have a really weird user interface and weird requirements. But it's a real cool key to unlock a very special award that's often available and they they charge 75k one way from like west coast ish to asia um or 85k from the east coast so it's it's fairly inexpensive and and have very low uh

surcharges as well yep and a very highly regarded business class or at least what was long heralded as one of the best out there, though things have changed a little bit in the last few years with Q suites and some other of those types of newer seats. But I think most people that have flown it speak very highly of it. So probably a good experience getting to Asia also. All right. So that one is unique in that they're the only ones that are one to one to EVA, right? Right, right. So that one is unique in that they're the only ones that are one-to-one to EVA, right?

Right, right, right. So I think Capital One is the only other one that offers it, but they have less than one-to-one transfer ratio. JetBlue, one-to-one. Chase also does one-to-one transfers to JetBlue. Amex does less than one-to-one if I remember. JetBlue, it varies. Usually you're not going to get outstanding value from your points, but every now and then you'll find a situation where you do. And so that's a nice little niche thing to have there. And we talked earlier about Wyndham. Capital One also has one-to-one to Wyndham, which can be nice to have. But as we talked about before, not really all that important since Wyndham so often has sales where they charge less than a penny per point during sales. All right. So pretty good, unique-ish transfer partners, wouldn't you say?

You know, unique-ish is such a crazy way to say that so choice they're not the only ones with choice they're not unique they're unique in the one to two but uh but amex of course has choice at one to one of course i wouldn't buy i wouldn't transfer it one to one but uh so it's unique-ish okay because of the one to two but turkish is not unique since you can get it via uh capital one or built uh jet blue is not unique wyndham is not unique so unique ish like in the sense that yeah there aren't many other programs that have access but like it's a stretch it's a using the word unique with ish is a stretch already isn't it like can you get something all right unique so so so So, but you'll give me that the Choice 1-2 is unique

and the Eva Air is unique 1-1 on that. So having good transfer ratios for both of those is really good. And they're good partners, potentially good partners. No, they're not all good partners. A couple of them are good partners. No, they're not all good partners. A couple of them are good partners. Plus, the city also has a number of transfer partners that are not unique, but are great transfer partners in general. So they've got Avianca Life Miles, which is one of Nick's favorite Star Alliance programs for booking Star Alliance awards. They have, you can transfer to Avios. So indirectly transfer to British Airways or Iberia or all of those. Air France and KLM, we mentioned earlier in the program, how valuable, sort of randomly valuable those points tend to be.

Virgin Atlantic, it has a number of really good sweet spots and i threw an emirates here in the list um they used to be so before emirates uh jacked up their uh their their fuel surcharges by a whole lot uh they were for a while the best way to book emirates own first class now it's gotten so expensive i'm not really sure. Their business class though. Is the best way anymore? So their business, so the first class, the surcharges are ridiculous.

Their business class sometimes has ridiculous surcharges and sometimes doesn't. And I don't know what the like secret sauce is. I was just looking at flights from New York to Milan actually yesterday also. So that's why it's top of mind. One way business class was 87K and $100 in taxes and fees per person, $104, I think, in taxes and fees per

person. Now the dates I was looking at, they were still flying a 777 and not the A380. They're taking the A380 off that route for a while. So I didn't continue to pursue it because the 777- And that's bad. Why? It's bad because the business class on the 7, it's not the newer 777. So it's the old business class. It's like a 232. It's not particularly nice.

So at 87,000 points one way for business class, they're kind of expensive. And so if it's not the A380, then I'm not interested. The A380 has a much nicer business class and has the bar at the back. And so then I may be willing to splurge some on that if I needed to get to Milan, but I don't actually need to get to Milan and the 777 doesn't interest me at all at that price. So, so, but my point here is that sometimes the surcharges are over a thousand dollars a person,

and sometimes they're a hundred dollars or so a person, and sometimes they're $100 or so a person. I'm not sure how they figure out when they're going to charge more or not, but it can be worth looking at for business class. For first class, the surcharges are always just very high. I haven't seen them low ever. One thing that's worth mentioning is that Emirates has changed that whole fuel surcharge thing multiple times over the last five years or so. Sometimes they've lowered them dramatically. Sometimes they raised them. And so I think they're just worth watching because they might lower them again.

And when they do, Emirates will once again be a good transfer partner, especially when there's a transfer bonus. Now, before you talk about what, oh, sorry, go ahead. Also, you're going to add something else. Well, I just wanted to say about Emirates, this has nothing to do with Citibank, but I just think it's a funny observation that, you know, Emirates is known for having one of the best first class products there is, but they're also known for most of their flights having a fairly poor business

class compared to the competition so it's it's just sort of a weird combination there and um so it's definitely worth doing your research about like which particular plane you'll be flying in and which business class yep yep yeah yeah i was just lucky i clicked on it because if i hadn't clicked i would just assumed it was the a380. I didn't realize they had taken that off the Milan route because it has been an A380 for a long time. Just lucky I clicked to see what kind of plane it was. I don't know why I did that, but I did. And I was like, oh, and I Googled it. It was like, look at that. Interesting. So Greg's right. You want to do your research there. So this list of points, I tried it, Greg, a little bit on the fact that the first set wasn't quite as unique as the word unique implies.

But overall, when you look at this list of partners, I do have to admit this is a pretty good list of partners. Now, that doesn't make it a great list of partners because a lot of their competitors have better lists, I think. But this has many very good programs. And when you combine that with the fact that you can earn 3X gas grocery travel basically with the Citi Premier card, and it's only going to cost you $95 a year to create a setup where you can earn 5X in a lot of different purchases, 3X on those other key categories a lot of people spend most of their money in. It's actually lukewarm. I mean, I would definitely give it a lukewarm. Awesome still, I struggle with the word awesome. But I think for somebody who doesn't want to have to pay $250 a

year for an Amex gold card and keep a platinum card for $695 a year and whatever else there or on the Chase side doesn't want to have to pay for a Sapphire Reserve. Of course, you could have the Sapphire Preferred and transfer to partners, but I could see the appeal here. You can get really good category multipliers for not very much money and an acceptable list of partners that I think includes a lot of value, even if it's money and an acceptable list of partners that I think includes a lot of value, even if it's not the widest list of partners. These are some good partners overall. Yeah. Yeah. And just to fill out the complete the picture of their transfer partners, Citi does not have any major domestic airline program. And what's glaringly missing is American Airlines

because Citi partners with American Airlines with the Citibank American Airlines credit cards. And yet they do not have American Airlines as a transfer partner. They did briefly for a few weeks a couple of years ago. But that's something that I think would make a big difference if they could correct that. They also are missing Air Canada Aeroplan, which that's a big, big mess. Yeah, I don't get that because Aeroplan seems to be very interested in selling their points to banks. They've partnered with, you know, basically everyone else. Yeah. And, you know, and been pretty aggressive in getting people interested in the program. So I'm really surprised. I don't know what's up with that,

why they haven't partnered up there. I should mention, by the way, that another thing that is a positive going for Citi is that they do have fairly regular transfer bonuses. I feel like Amex has more transfer bonuses than Citi, but Citi tends to have more than either Chase or Capital One. So you do get periodic transfer bonuses to Air France, KLM. Every now and then, Avianca runs those transfer bonuses where you can transfer in. And we have that Wyndham one that I think is still going on for another week, week and a half or so. So we do see those every now and then. Virgin Atlantic pops up also. So those are, I think another thing that enhances the value of the Citi program, at least a bit. Right, right. So now on, on the negative side, we already mentioned,

there's not much going on with signup bonuses. So if that's the way you want to earn your points, Citi's not the program for you. Um, Citi also doesn't do anything much, anything at all with friend referrals. So if you like to earn points, Amex is so good with this where you could refer your spouse and back and forth and get all kinds of points, but that's not an option with the city program uh so this is an awesome program i'll assert for those who want a low total annual fee and who um want to like sort of get their collection of cards and just stop there like not not be sort of playing the game of signing up for new cards all the time and and trying to get others to sign up for cards and all that kind of stuff um it's you know you can

just get a very high earning rate um good transfer uh partners some some great ones uh and yeah you're missing a couple things like aer plan. That's really unfortunate, I think. But otherwise, a very solid program. I'm not going to stand behind my it's the best program. I think for some people, it's the best program, but not for me. Yeah, it's not for me either, because Greg and I both would much rather be chasing new welcome bonuses, I think, and perks, various perks. I mean, there's no priority pass on any of these cards. There's no travel protections when you're booking your flights. There are a lot of drawbacks in Citi's program. And that's a glaring one to me. If you're going to offer travel credit cards and try to get people that are travelers to get your cards,

how do you now offer any sort of travel protections, whether that's trip delay, trip cancellation, lost baggage, et cetera? I just can't believe they don't have anything they used to have good protections but then they stripped it off of all the cards so that's been a big disappointment for years running now for city it it really has and i'm wondering so so you mentioned before there have been rumors about about new like uhpremium city thank you card coming out. And if that happens, one indicator we have, an interesting development was the new revised American Airlines executive card, that's their high-end card, has travel protections on it. So that was a surprise when when that was announced and so cities at

least dip their toe back into the travel protections waters um so we'll see whether they do that with if if it's a big if in my mind uh if they come out with a premium City thank you card what will that look like will it include uh travel protections my guess at this point is if they do come out with an ultra premium card it will have travel protections? My guess at this point is if they do come out with an ultra premium card, it will have travel protections, but we'll see. Yeah. So now the use case where Greg kind of mentioned the type of person this might be good for, but the use case that popped into my mind while you were describing it was there's a reader named Dee who's commented on posts before talking about how when she

started to plan as she got older and she's starting to plan her estate planning and things like that, she said that her kids had asked her to simplify things because she had all these credit cards and all these programs and all these points. And it was something that her kids weren't interested in learning about or understanding how to maximize and didn't want to have to deal with a million different accounts and the points spread all over the place in the case she was incapacitated or whatever, couldn't handle that stuff herself. So she had simplified significantly. Now I could see where somebody who's looking to do that,

who has a bunch of points already, doesn't need to continue adding to piles in a very large way, but still wants to earn good rewards on everyday spend. And perhaps also someone who's retired, who's looking to manage expenses and not spend a lot of money on annual fees. I think this could be a good strategy for kind of tapering off as you get to the point where you're like, well, I don't need tons more points, but I still want to earn a decent return on my spend. Because even if you're cashing these points out at 3x and 5x in the categories they're in, with the card combination we've talked about, and then redeeming each year the $100,000 for cash, for $1,000 cash and getting 10,000 points back. This is, I think, a pretty good tapering off strategy for somebody who's like, you know what, I'm looking to simplify. I'm set now for the travels I need. And so I don't need every card and to continue chasing stuff.

So yeah, I think it makes sense there. Another way of saying the same thing. It's a good for someone who prefers a cashback strategy. It's a good combination while at the same time retaining the ability to take advantage of points deals

when you need them. So if it's still something that might come up every now and then where you need a good points deal, there you go. Yep. Awesome. Very good.

All right. That I think wraps up our main event for this week where Greg agrees that city is only lukewarm, but great for some people. And it's funny because I know, I know you collect city points still, right? I mean,

it's not that Greg is anti city. It's just, oh no no i i just wouldn't if i had to pick just one program um city wouldn't be it but but it's it's not it it wouldn't be easy to discard it yeah let me put it that way because i really do value things like the choice transfer and and and now the eva thing because of having seen firsthand how good award availability is through that program. Yeah, yeah. And I could see it being the choice for some people that want that simple approach. So it's not that we can't envision the scenario. I think a lot of times it's easy to get caught in the echo chamber and fail to envision the fact that some

people just look at things differently, right? And want a different strategy. And so this could be an acceptable strategy for some folks. All right. That, I think, my friends, brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in via email to our giant mailbag. If you want to send in a question to be considered for a question of the week or a piece of feedback for the giant mailbag, I mentioned this at the end of the show. But if you don't listen all the way to the end of the goodbye song, maybe you've missed it. You want to send that to mailbag at frequent miler dot com.

Again, that's mailbag at frequent miler dot com. So this email came in and I know Greg has already seen this, but I thought that this was worth discussing anyway. So a reader writes in and says, both my wife and I have the Chase Sapphire Preferred cards. Sounds like we should downgrade one of the cards to a Freedom card to eliminate one of the annual fees. I know I can currently transfer ultimate rewards from one card to another. That's from this person's Sapphire Preferred to their spouse's Sapphire Preferred. I'm hoping to confirm that if I downgrade my wife's card to a Freedom card, we can still transfer her points to my Sapphire.

So first, let's confirm that. And then there's a tag question that I think is also worth addressing quickly. So can you still transfer the points if you downgrade one? Yes, absolutely. Easy, easy answer. You can transfer your points to within Chase Altamira Awards cards. You can move points around to your own cards or to one household member. So you can, yeah, yeah. As long as they have the same address listed on their cards as you do,

you should be able to transfer to them. The only exception I can think of is there's a card, the Ink Business Premier, I think it's called, doesn't allow that point transfer, but every other Chase Ultimate Rewards card does. Yeah. And again, it doesn't matter

if you downgrade, upgrade, whatever. It doesn't matter if you don't have any of the ultra premium ones on your side or any of the premium ones. One spouse could have just freedom cards and the other spouse could have the Sapphire Preferred and whatever else. And the spouse with just freedom cards doesn't need to have any of those $95 cards. Just transfer their points over to the partner who does have a transferable points card like the Sapphire Preferred. So certainly you can still do that second question and this is one that comes up from time to time so another good

one to address is it best to transfer her ultimate rewards to mine before the downgrade should you transfer before you downgrade one uh there's no reason to do that that i could think of no no me either. I wouldn't worry about it. I wouldn't worry about it either. You're going to retain your ultimate rewards points balance. So no, it doesn't matter. I get the fear there,

people being nervous about their points suddenly disappearing. But in a product change situation, you maintain the points. They don't go away. So if you closed, if you're going to close your card, then you would definitely want to transfer the points out before you close the card. And Greg can tell you all about why.

But yeah, if you're just downgrading, then downgrade. That's fine. Move them over whenever you want before, after. Doesn't matter. Yeah. And if you do accidentally close a card that has ultimate rewards points, they do give you some buffer time to reopen the account. And so you can get those points back if that happens, which I did several years ago. Let me just add to this whole scenario that I think what he's talking about is a great idea.

There's no reason to pay two annual fees for Chase Sapphire preferred cards. What you could do is, as he suggested, downgrade one of them. Let's say, for example, he does a Freedom Unlimited. So the wife has a Freedom Unlimited card, which earns 3x for dining and drugstores and one and a half X everywhere else. And then she could even add the spouse as an authorized user. So you each have a card that earns a base rate of one and a half points per dollar everywhere and three X in some places, and um use the sapphire preferred account for uh travel and um and for the ability to transfer points to transfer partners yeah it's a great strategy and and one we've talked about before but we get questions like this from time to time so i think it's worth addressing that because i think it is a little confusing to wrap your mind around the fact that

yeah you only need one of those there's no sense in paying the annual fee for both of you to have a card to transfer to partners in most cases anyway. So, yeah, that's a smart strategy to go after. And the way Greg mentioned it is particularly good in terms of figuring out which of those cards is best to put those categories of spend on. So you can both share the best rewards for all of your purchases and retain the ability to transfer to partners. So keep up the good work. Hopefully that helps answer that question. Unfortunately, we are out of time for this week. So if you've enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week,

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